NYPD: West Indian American Day Parade attendees are savages

This week the big news on the Racism Watch is the New York City cops who have been discussing on Facebook black attendees of Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Parade in classically unsavory terms: “Animals.” “Savages.” “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” And it would hardly be hasty to assume that terms even meaner than those were bandied about; we are only being told about snippets of a thread since erased from the site.

Typically, news like this is classified as evidence that racism in America is still “out there,” and in ways more significant than what is acknowledged by those who claim it is on the wane. People like, yes, me.

I thought it might be useful to spell out how someone like me receives news like this business with the New York cops. I have always stressed that conflict between the cops and, especially, young black men is the keystone reason for a sense among blacks that white America stands united against them. Racism manifests itself in other ways, but most of those cases are not the kind that make healthy people feel as if a nation is set against them. As Ellis Cose has said, “Rage does not flow from dry numerical analyses of discrimination or from professional prospects projected on a statistician’s screen.”

Rage does flow from being pulled over and maybe even roughed up by the cops for no good reason.